This Friday, University of Melbourne students and staff will be standing with school students walking out of class for the School Strike 4 Climate. They struck last November, with participants numbering in the 15,000s. They will be demanding an end to new coal and gas projects, an end to the Adani Coal Mine, an 100% […]

President / Molly Willmott Hi there! Welcome to your UMSU for 2019. My name’s Molly, and for me, my university adventure started in an UMSU club, and has taken me to volunteering opportunities, activism, and now as your President. As you navigate the jungle that is the University of Melbourne, UMSU will be with you […]

In mathematics, there’s a big drop-off in percentage representation of female and non- binary students between undergraduate courses and postgraduate courses. So, to explore this further, I interviewed five women and one non- binary person who are currently undergraduate maths students at the University of Melbourne.

Student 1 I’m a second year studying pure maths, logic, and a dash of statistics. I’m not sure what I’m going to do after my degree, but I’m definitely considering postgrad logic. I’m also non-binary. I think my gender has definitely affected my studies. I’m often not comfortable being out as non-binary in class the […]

Nonfiction

“The story so far: in the beginning the University of Melbourne was one of many institutions that introduced the Consent Matters program as part of their response to the 2017 Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) inquiry into university sexual harassment and assault.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

Although the taboo surrounding menstruation is waning, pads and tampons still tend to triumph in popularity over the humble menstrual cup. According to a fascinating article by Natalie Shure in Pacific Standard magazine, the menstrual cup has a long history dating all the way back to the 1930s. That menstrual cups are today still largely unheard-of is, in my opinion, a travesty.

What do you get when you combine memes about bubble tea, hilarious reaction videos, and multilingual puns? The answer is “subtle asian traits” (SAT), a Facebook group aimed at Asians living in the West. Originally started at the end of 2018, the group now has over a million members. Most of the people in this group share one trait in common: being the children of Asian immigrants in Western countries.

Creative

A slender, green-tinted arm extends, casting a shadow over the amalgamated skyscrapers below. Its long, feeble fingers slowly wrap around the southern bridge as it tries to rip the rest of itself out of the black mirror on the side of the old casino. The void spits out a head encased in a blue bob and a body with armour hugging its figure so tight that a single wrong movement could crush its bones.

So. The premise is there are three planar components to the multiverse. The inner planes are the houses of elementals: dimensions of the spirits, and energies that set the universe going like a fat gold watch. There are dimensions here for the elements, for matter and antimatter, and however many smaller planes for all the forces that roll through the cosmos.

Culture

The world-renowned musical Jersey Boys tells the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, the rock and pop band who achieved massive international success during the 1960s and 70s. Since starting in 2005 in La Jolla, California, Jersey Boys has already toured the world in places like Broadway, West End, Japan and Singapore. It was first performed in Melbourne in 2009, and 10 years later it has returned to greet the Melbourne public once again at the Regent Theatre.

My ride to Pitch was sitting beside a pungent-smelling senior citizen who was fake-calling someone on his phone, whining about “no intellects in the overpopulated city,” “r****ded lefty policies” and a “very fake evil god”. I knew I was in for a Labour Weekend-long journey – one that included more than bumps, darts and guerns.

In the middle of the dancefloor lie several elongated television screens stacked in a small pile, surrounded by wires. The speakers pulse in semi-unison, a fury of rhythmic beats that border between white noise and music. The screens flash in synchronized stripes of color. This forms the set to award-winning choreographer Antony Hamilton’s new dance piece, Universal Estate.

As someone who only just purged the primary school art work still living in my drawers, and has had ‘go vegetarian’ on my to-do list for four years now but has never bothered to learn how to cook, I am well versed in the art of procrastination and chronic laziness. I believed there would be no better show to describe my terrible life choices than The Lazy Show, promoted as a mixture of stand-up comedy and personal storytelling by Nikki Viveca that captures what it means to be “a lazy person in a busy person’s world”. And it certainly delivered.

UMSU and the media office are located in the city of Melbourne, on the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations. We pay our respects to their elders—past, present and emerging—and acknowledge that the land we are on was stolen and sovereignty was never ceded.